As sports punditry becomes ever more a matter of pinch-and-swipe motions on touchscreens and iPads, there’s something magnificently defiant in the sight of Sir Clive Woodward reporting for work with a black A4 notebook thick enough to stun a charging second-row forward. “Pinch and swipe this,” that

Champions League games are tiring. Martin Atkinson should have been given an additional day to recover. Send Martin to a hotel somewhere, just as Liverpool did with Raheem Sterling.” (Keith Hackett, retired referee and former general manager of the Professional Game Match Officials Board, after

The only England player to hit five sixes in a World Cup match before Moeen Ali helped himself to Scotland’s obligingly even-tempered bowling on Sunday was TV’s own David Gower. That was against Sri Lanka in 1983 in the days when standing in a studio at a peculiarly impractical table and lobbing

A week of awkward encounters for Sir Alex Ferguson. On Wednesday, the former Manchester United manager found himself silently sharing the business cabin of a plane from Paris to Manchester with Roy Keane. Witnesses confirm that the pair favoured a concentrated 90 minutes with the in-flight reading

We’re under way at the ICC Cricket World Cup and all the talk is about “hitting the ground running”. Nothing more important, clearly. Australia and New Zealand, our hosts, have both hit the ground running. Ireland have definitely hit the ground running. West Indies thought they had hit the ground

Exclusive: from a leaked internal memo to staff at Sky Sports. “Understandably, in the wake of the company’s £4 billion outlay to secure the lion’s share of Premier League football for the next three years, anxieties have been voiced about the possibility of budgetary cutbacks in other areas of our

Congratulations to Joey Essex who last night, in Kuhtai, Austria, took gold in The Jump. The former The Only Way is Essex cast member succeeds Joe McElderry who, to the accolade of being the winner of The X-Factor whom nobody quite remembers, in 2014 added the honour of being the winner of Channel

People marvelled at the attention to detail of the England rugby union squad, who prepared for last night’s appearance in the cauldron of the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff — with its notorious so-called Delilah factor — by training in front of speakers primed to pump out Max Boyce’s Hymns and Arias

Anxiety will have been high, no doubt, as the players gathered this week and the medical staff performed their final checks and reviews. Encouragingly, though, and refreshingly contrary to the dominant theme of the tournament’s build-up, the reports emanating from the camp suggest that the BBC goes

It will go down, inevitably, as the first deadline day of the post sex-toy era — and we will be some time measuring the full extent of what has been lost. The background: five months ago, as the summer transfer window closed, Alan Irwin, going about his business as a reporter for Sky Sports News